Lovingkindness Before the Kettle Boils

The kettle in that house is the one that takes ages and everybody has said for three years that they should get a new one and nobody wants a new one.

Ten past six. Low gold coming in through the window over the sink because the house faces that way and always has.

Two mugs out, because her son is up, which is not normal, and he is leaning against the counter with his hood up saying nothing, which is the correct way for a sixteen year old to be in a kitchen at ten past six.

She fills the kettle. She does this before anything else, every morning of her life, before the curtains, before her shoes, before a word to anybody.

And here is what she is turning over while it takes its time.

Something got hold of her about ten days ago. She is not going to make a thing of it. But she has been softer since, and more present, and it is good, and she has caught herself several times this week actually being in the room with people.

And she has already worked out that this will not survive an ordinary Tuesday. Not a bad Tuesday. An ordinary one. Because ordinary is what wears a thing down, and she knows the sequence: something lifts, then the week comes, and then she is running on resolve, and resolve lasts about nine days.

Come and lean on the other counter with me. Because there is one line in a psalm about mornings and there is a verb in it that decides everything.

Cause me to hear

David again, near the end of a hard psalm, and he asks for one specific thing.

Cause me to hear thy lovingkindness in the morning; for in thee do I trust: cause me to know the way wherein I should walk; for I lift up my soul unto thee.Psalm 143:8

Cause me to hear.

Not let me remember to listen. Not help me be more attentive. Cause. He is asking God to be the agent of his own hearing.

That is a strange prayer if you think hearing is your job. It is a perfectly sensible prayer if you have noticed, as this man clearly had, that a person cannot make themselves hear something.

And notice he asks it twice in one verse. Cause me to hear. Cause me to know. He is putting both of them on God's side, deliberately, in a psalm where he is at the end of himself.

You are able to ask Him to cause the hearing, and that request puts the whole verb on His side of the sentence. That is not a rearrangement to spare a tired woman; Psalm 143:8 says cause me twice and never once asks the person to generate it, and it is the Holy Spirit who takes David's prayer and stands it up in a kitchen at ten past six with a slow kettle on. The thing you have been trying to keep up was never yours to power.

Now the resolve, and let me be honest with you about it, because you have been honest with me.

You said resolve lasts about nine days. That is not a confession of weakness, that is an accurate observation about how resolve works in every human being who has ever lived, and the fact that you know the number means you have been paying attention.

But look at what you have been doing with that knowledge: you have been using it to predict the failure of a good thing, instead of using it to conclude that the good thing was never running on resolve in the first place.

Ten days ago something got hold of you. You did not produce it. So there is no obvious reason to assume it was ever going to be maintained by the thing that did not produce it.

You did not produce what got hold of you ten days ago, and there is no reason to think it was running on the thing that could not have made it. Philippians 2:13 says it is God which worketh in you both to will and to do of his good pleasure, and it is the Holy Spirit who does that working rather than a woman with a kettle and a diary.

What an ordinary Tuesday actually is

One more thing, and it will change what you expect of Tuesday.

You said ordinary is what wears a thing down. And in the economy of resolve, that is exactly right.

But in the economy of that psalm, ordinary is where the whole arrangement lives. He does not ask to hear the lovingkindness on a mountain or at a crisis. He asks to hear it in the morning, which is the most ordinary and repeated unit of time there is.

The daily is not the enemy of this. The daily is the delivery mechanism.

You are living in the exact place the arrangement was designed for, and mornings were chosen precisely because they are ordinary and they keep coming. Psalm 143:8 locates it in the morning rather than in a moment, and it is the Holy Spirit who makes an ordinary Tuesday the likeliest place for it rather than the thing that ends it.

And here is the last piece, because you have a mouth and it works before the kettle does.

Jesus said in Matthew 17:20 that faith the size of a mustard seed, spoken to a mountain, is enough to move it. The smallest seed there is. Not how long your resolve has ever lasted. That a person opens their mouth and says what God has said. You have that standing because you are in Christ and Christ is in you, and speaking is the appointed way this works. We flip the switch. He sends the current.